Ha, just got my hands on the hunter's weapons now (went down like a little bitch, incidentally ).

Just as insane. Fully modded sniper rifle that does same damage as a plasma weapon, but with a 15% aim increase, three free reloads, 15% chance that the action will be refunded... and only uses one action instead of two, meaning you can move and fire it in the same turn.

Hunter's pistol does 5-8 damage (plasma one does 4-7), but ignores up to 5 points of armour. Seeing as it's being used by my gunslinger with lightning reflexes, chain shot and fan fire (three shots on the same target) I'm looking at this as my sectopod nuker.

I've chased away the damned assassin 4 times now with her interfering in nearly every mission I do. Avatar project is 5 squares from completion, I have 2 dark events playing out on me and Ive just lost my best ranger. On the plus side I have mag weapons, psionics is built I have decent reserves in the team to make up for losses. I need to make a decision though, try to reduce the avatar project or go after the assassin with more effort.

Jez wrote:I've chased away the damned assassin 4 times now with her interfering in nearly every mission I do. Avatar project is 5 squares from completion, I have 2 dark events playing out on me and Ive just lost my best ranger. On the plus side I have mag weapons, psionics is built I have decent reserves in the team to make up for losses. I need to make a decision though, try to reduce the avatar project or go after the assassin with more effort.

First of all, once the Avatar project bar fills up, you get a full 20 days to do something about it (ie assault an alien base to reduce the counter), so it's not as urgent as the game makes it sound. Assuming you have the resistance ring built you should be given covert ops to do, and some of those will reduce the counter as well.

Also, via the resistance ring, you need to complete three covert ops to track down a Chosen before you'll be able to assault their base, so you need to invest a bit of time and effort to reach that point.

Finally took down the Assassin. That mission was absolutely brutal for reasons I won't spoil (nothing too exciting, just difficult). I lost the Spark unit I took on the mission before I even got to the Assassin herself, meaning I lost my single rocket launcher shot that could have made all the difference. The Assassin killed my Templar, despite equipping him with one of those life-saver devices, and my dying sniper heroically took the final shot at the sarcophagus while being dissolved by acid.

I think my memorial board is about the same length as my active roster now. I'm recruiting more, but I'm just not getting chance to train new recruits as I'm needing to take my best people to make sure I'm actually successful in missions. It's awkward enough losing people, but I'm also losing their equipment which can't be replaced easily. I don't have the supplies, nor the intel to buy new bits at the black market.

It'd be *really* nice to get some missions to rescue the troops that were captured on sunday. Is there any way to make those more likely?

Raid, it just occurred to me - not sure if you knew already, but there's a room you can build that allows you to upgrade your recruits to sergeant, I think. Either the training room or the guerrilla training centre, can't remember which. Would help give you a serviceable team quite quickly.

Piece on RPS about the Challenge mode, which I've not even tried yet. A new mission every day which awards scores for completing it skillfully and puts you on a leaderboard against other people's scores:

I got cornered into a random mission earlier, a difficult one as it happens. Its difficult mainly because of the numbers involved, fairly standard enemies. So I took my time getting my guys into position for maximum flanking of the target. When I was ready I triggered the ambush. Every single one of the overwatch failed, the advent repositioned on the next turn. Thought ok then a bit unlucky but ill get you all now.... bit of moving around got my percentages up to 80, 90 % and I'm not fucking kidding every one of my shots missed out of 6 troops on various targets. I was spitting feathers by now and not only that but the advent got a miraculous round, 3 of my guys mind controlled, the others either on fire or under serious threat hanging on by a few points.

Fuming I was. Fuckin raging. Quit.

The odds must have been astronomical for this set of circumstances ... or it cheats now and then.

Pretty unlucky there, Jez. I've not had anything that bad, though there have been a few occasions where I've had one last soldier to fire on an enemy I absolutely need for them to take down and they've missed a 95% shot.

I can't decide whether the game has taken it easy on me, whether the equipment I've researched and gathered has helped, or whether it's just that I'm back into the swing of things, but I've been having a lot more success lately. I'm still occasionally failing objectives, but I've lost far fewer soldiers over the last few days. As such I've got nearly a screen full of colonels or equivalent.

The psi-ops soldiers I've trained turned out to be immensely useful during an incredibly messy "hunt the Advent General" mission where the Warlock turned up and immediately summoned two Advent Priests. I'd had to advance perhaps too quickly to catch the General before he escaped so my people were quite spread out. It was one mind-control after another, and I couldn't advance up to take the enemies out while keeping control over my own people. Thankfully the Stasis ability removes mind control, something I only found out by accident when I nearly killed my own Reaper with overwatch fire (they were down to 2hp, I put stasis on them to stop them firing down at me as I'd put them on a fantastic vantage point).

I *finally* used the skulljack for the first time, which is amusing given the Advent Commander I needed to use it on is probably the least effective enemy I'm encountering now (Sectopods and Gatekeepers have been appearing for a while), and they'd become quite rare. He probably wasn't best pleased when Mox yanked him from halfway across the map to get him into range of my guy with the skulljack, slashed him with his wrist blades, and then had a different blade shoved into his skull. Not the nicest way to go.